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Despite the vast and richness of antonymous pairs possessed in Bantu languages, very
little effort has been put to investigate them, as compared to other European languages.
The overall image from the current literature is negative- no single study has been cited
upon it, in spite of being a robust sense relation in many natural human languages. This
research, therefore, aimed at studying this sense relation using Nyakyusa, as one of the
Bantu languages. The study used a qualitative research methodology to collect data from
the field. The methods involved included: Interviews, lexical questionnaires,
documentary review and Focus Group Discussions.
A research was guided by a Conceptual Semantics framework which investigates how
linguistic utterances are related to human cognition, distinguishes a single, universal
meaning to a word .Conceptual Semantics is considered to be, not just a linguistic theory,
but a theory of human cognition. Data obtained from the field was established into
tabular pair-wise categories, which reflected the linguistics terms for types of antonyms.
Results indicate categories of antonyms as Gradables, Complementarities, Reverses,
Relationals and Directional antonyms. Further analysis was also done to examine the
pairs formulated, on how one could easily apply them in different sentential
constructions. A researcher is very hopeful, that this work could form a good base, upon
which other researchers could build on, to investigate other sense relations in Bantu
languages. |
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